In 2003 Arthur Butterworth
celebrated his eightieth birthday and
as he now enters the middle years of
his ninth decade, he can look back on
a life of richly diverse musical interests.
After early studies with Vaughan Williams
- still one of his heroes – he became
a professional trumpet-player with the
Scottish National Orchestra where for
a time he acted as apprentice conductor
to Walter Susskind. There was then a
period in the trumpet section of the
Hallé under Barbirolli and later
on he worked as teacher and lecturer.
Yet throughout these years it is composition
that has remained the central thread.
Indeed, despite his status as an octogenarian
there is little sign of any abating
of the flow of inspiration. His Fifth
Symphony was completed early in
2003 and premiered by the BBC Philharmonic
the following October. The sixth instalment
in his symphonic cycle was completed
in 2006 and at the time of writing awaits
its first performance.

His output is extensive
and encompasses a wide range of genres
with the notable exception of opera,
a form on which he has been outspoken
on more than one occasion. Yet although
the breadth of his output is impressive,
it is in the world of brass bands that
he has arguably achieved notable success.
This is attributable not only to a number
of fine works for the medium but also
to his close involvement with the National
Youth Brass Band of Great Britain.

At one level this is
no surprise, for as a Lancastrian Butterworth’s
northern roots are evident not only
in his compositions but also in his
early musical training. Brass bands
were with him from the beginning and
as a young man he progressed to become
a cornet player in the Besses O’ th’
Barn Band, which historically has enjoyed
considerable success. Earlier still
it had been the local church choir that
had provided his first musical induction.
Ultimately however, when music presented
itself as a potential career he came
up against the all too familiar parental
opposition.

"I started as
a choir boy but quickly turned to the
church brass band that we had in New
Moston, Manchester. My father was not
at all happy with this and thought that
I should do something decent, like be
articled to a solicitor or work as an
engineer. In the end I did go into a
firm of solicitors just after leaving
school to learn the legal business,
but the war had just started and within
two years of leaving school I was in
the army. The night before I went into
the army my father remarked, ‘If you
are that keen on music, when you come
out of the army I’ll not stand in your
way’."

Upon the commencement
of his military service it seemed logical
that Butterworth should become a member
of one of the army bands.

"Although I played
the trumpet, I wasn’t all that good.
Having been a cornet player at Besses
I thought I knew it all, so when I went
into the army I tried to get into the
Royal Engineers Band. It was no go because
I was A1 and any really fit young men
were for the fighting front. So, although
I wanted to go into the band the bandmaster
said the only way I could go in was
if I signed up for twelve years and
I didn’t want to do that. However it
turned out to be a blessing in disguise,
for instead I joined a field company
of Royal Engineers and found myself
in Germany towards the close of the
war. Thereby began a long association
with German musicians and the classics.
That was a real eye- and ear-opener
for me, so when I did eventually come
out of the army, although I went back
to Besses I called it a day after only
a month."

By this time, with
newly broadened musical horizons, Butterworth
realised that the musically insular
nature of the brass band world was too
restrictive for his musical curiosity
and soon found himself studying at the
Royal Manchester College of Music. It
was here that he came under the influence
and later the tutelage of Vaughan Williams.

"Diffidently I
showed him some songs and said that
I was very sorry that they were very
much like what he would have written.
He responded by saying not to worry
about it and that he had been the greatest
cribber since Handel. He went on to
tell me that as an English composer,
just like him, we were influenced by
the same things, the countryside and
the environment. In fact, the same natural
English language. Like him in learning
from Parry and Stanford, one has to
learn from ones predecessors; hence
my learning from him. He told me that
eventually, if I was lucky, something
of my own would come through, but never
to force it. Forced originality would
never succeed. Then he said the most
generous thing that a great man could
say to a young nonentity like me. He
said that if in thirty or forty years
time his music did not have the same
appeal to me, not to feel disloyal.
Of course, he was right, although I
like his music it doesn’t bowl me over
in the way it did in 1950".

In the following years
it was as a professional trumpet player
that Butterworth was to earn his living,
initially with the Scottish National
Orchestra. Already he had had some experience
of conducting, having gained a diploma
before going into the army at the age
of eighteen. Consequently he immediately
struck up a relationship with the orchestra’s
conductor at the time, Walter Susskind.

"I suppose I fell
on my feet in a way, because Walter
Susskind, who gave me the trumpet job,
knew I liked conducting and made me
the kind of dogsbody assistant conductor.
I did schoolchildren’s concerts, sectional
rehearsals and stood in for guest conductors
who would only turn up the day before
the concert for which they were engaged.
I was also helped and encouraged in
this respect by Karl Rankl, who succeeded
Susskind at the SNO. It was quite an
apprenticeship as for Rankl I also got
to conduct Schoenberg and Sibelius.
Rankl had no liking for Sibelius hence
the fact that I was able to conduct
the music of my favourite composer.
Eventually I managed to get myself a
few out of town concerts."

In 1955 Butterworth
was to return to his Manchester roots
to take up a position with the Hallé
who were then at the height of their
powers under John Barbirolli. Scotland
however, had made a lasting impression
on the young composer and proved to
be a formative influence on his music.

"The landscape
and the climate were particularly influential
and proved to have quite an impact on
my First Symphony, written in 1949-56."

The Manchester connection
was here too, for it was Barbirolli
and the Hallé who premiered the
Symphony No. 1 at the 1957 Cheltenham
Festival. How it was that Butterworth
came to be become a member of the trumpet
section of the orchestra is a story
he delights in telling.

"I knew the orchestral
manager of the Hallé, Wally Jones,
a tuba player, and he asked if I could
play one of the extra trumpet parts
in Verdi’s Requiem for the Hallé
at the Edinburgh Festival. I told him
that the Scottish had a job elsewhere
that day, but that I would fix him up
with four other off-stage trumpeters
to do the job, which I duly did. It
just so happened that some months later
I was down in London and noticed that
the Hallé were playing at the
Royal Albert Hall. Going along to hear
the concert I met Wally Jones in the
bar. He commented that "the boss"
(meaning Barbirolli) had been very pleased
with the trumpet players I had arranged
for the Edinburgh Festival, so casually
I said that if a job came up with the
Hallé I would be happy to go
back to Manchester. A fortnight later
a telegram arrived asking if I would
be interested in second trumpet. I can
remember Barbirolli at the audition
asking what I had brought to play. "I
suppose it’s the Haydn Trumpet Concerto,
all trumpeters play that". After
playing a bit of the Haydn he said "you
play with my old orchestra the Scottish,
under Susskind don’t you? You must know
Dvorak Eight then". "Oh yes
I replied, we’re always playing that".
So, after playing the trumpet call from
the last movement he asked, "When
can you start?" It was so different
from today where any number of players
may be tried for six months and the
management want to know whether you
will fit in socially as well as musically."

Barbirolli was aware
of Butterworth’s compositional aspirations
and knew that a couple of his works
had been performed by the Scottish Orchestra
during his tenure with them. So it was
that after a year or so with the Hallé
the young composer gave Barbirolli the
score of his First Symphony.

"His response
was that he would take a look at it
but that there could be no promises.
Then, one February morning he said,
‘Have you seen the "Telegraph"
this morning Butterworth? If you take
a look you will see we are doing your
First Symphony at the Cheltenham
Festival’. That was how I found out
about it. He did ask if I would like
to conduct it, but I thought it would
be better that he did it. I was right.
Although I had had some experience of
conducting I could not have got out
of it what he did with his authority
and international prestige."

Despite his reticence
over the First Symphony, conducting
continued to be a field in which Butterworth
did take a serious interest and over
the coming years he was to conduct a
good number of his own works. His feelings
on the subject of conducting his own
work have nonetheless remained mixed.

"Berlioz was a
great conductor of his own music and
so was Wagner. Elgar perhaps passably,
although a number of his players thought
that he was not the best conductor.
Arnold Bax on the other hand, would
not conduct a note of his own music.
It is sometimes far better to let someone
else do it and let them see the score
from the outside. For the composer/conductor
it can only be subjective, although
more than anything else sitting in good
orchestras for a number of years under
good, indifferent and bad conductors
does teach one what works. I particularly
admired Barbirolli first and foremost,
but also Boult. I didn’t much care for
Sargent and neither did the players.
Orchestras didn’t like him. Amongst
composer/conductors I played under Hindemith
and he was capital, absolutely first
rate. He looked like a successful banker.
Unlike most conductors he would attend
rehearsals in a pin stripe suit and
silk tie but he knew how to conduct
an orchestra and had a sense of humour.
Vaughan Williams, whilst not a great
technician with the baton, knew what
he wanted and would ask if the part
suited. For instance when we did his
Eighth Symphony he would come round
the orchestra saying ‘Have I written
this all right for you? I’ve not done
anything that I shouldn’t have done
have I?’ Unlike Walton who was rather
arrogant, the orchestra never found
him easy or communicative".

By this stage of his
career Butterworth was building a substantial
catalogue of works. The years during
and immediately after his period at
the Hallé saw the composition
of several of his most popular pieces,
amongst them The Path Across the
Moors (which was later transcribed
for brass band), The Quiet Tarn
and The Green Wind, both dating
from 1961. The Moors, a large
scale suite for orchestra and organ
followed in 1962 and ultimately the
Second Symphony of 1964. Well
before this time the early influence
of Vaughan Williams had been shaken
off to reveal a rugged, craggy and often
austere sound-world, unmistakably imbued
with the North and the landscapes that
have meant so much to the composer throughout
his life. Not surprisingly therefore,
the music of Sibelius has been a lifelong
passion and Butterworth still cites
the Finnish master as one of the most
powerful influences on his own musical
language.

"The greatest
influence has been Sibelius, apart from
the language of English music, Parry,
Vaughan Williams and obviously Elgar.
The influence of Sibelius is not just
musical but something I can’t easily
define. It’s climate and landscape and
being a northerner. By ‘northerner’
I mean northern Europe and Scandinavia,
which is a part of the world I feel
associated with. During the war I was
in North Africa and the heat was something
that didn’t appeal to me one little
bit. It still doesn’t and I have never
been on holiday there".

Another great love
is the music of Arnold Bax and the mere
mention of his name has Butterworth
exclaiming in rapturous admiration.

"I first got to
know the music of Bax in 1948 when I
went in for the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra
young conductor’s competition and the
sight reading test was Tintagel.
There were three of us who were selected
for the scholarship and we were given
the score of Tintagel to look
through for about ten minutes. I was
fascinated by it and its English romanticism.
Then, a few years later when in the
Scottish, the second bassoon player
came one day with an instrument I didn’t
recognise. When I asked what it was
he replied that it was a heckelphone
and that he had got a job the following
week with the BBC Scottish playing the
Bax First Symphony. He asked
me if I wanted to go along, which I
did, and was absolutely knocked sideways
by it. Some years later I had the opportunity
to conduct this work with the Slaithwaite
Philharmonic; they even went to the
trouble of finding a heckelphone player
to do it properly and they were assisted
by the Bax Society in putting it on".

Butterworth’s time
with the Hallé came to an end
in 1961 when he decided to take the
step of moving into teaching, thus allowing
more time to devote to composition.

"I left the Hallé
because it was taking up so much time.
It was a six day week, sometimes seven;
my two daughters were just at childhood
stage and I wasn’t seeing enough of
them. I wanted to spend more time composing
so took the plunge, went into teaching
to give me an income and never looked
back. I frankly didn’t enjoy the teaching
very much and don’t think with hindsight
that I was a particularly good brass
teacher. If one is a capable performer
you don’t see the problems of others;
whereas if you are not a particularly
good performer one can sympathise with
pupils. So I taught for about nine years
and it did open the way to other things.
Ultimately it led to my getting the
Huddersfield Philharmonic and that in
turn led to some concerts with the BBC
Northern and the BBC Scottish. Eventually
I went to teach composition at Huddersfield,
the Polytechnic as it was then, and
spent another eight years there. Unfortunately
though, I didn’t enjoy that for different
reasons. It wasn’t that the pupils weren’t
good but rather that I felt under-used
and that there was no opportunity to
take on the things that I wanted to
do. The outlook was very narrow musically,
avant-garde yes, but for one who had
been in the practical business of first
rate orchestral playing, I didn’t even
get the chance to work with the college
orchestra".

Huddersfield was to
become particularly associated with
the avant-garde, a field of music that
for which Butterworth felt little or
no sympathy.

"Those of us that
were born in the 1920s grew up to our
first mid-teen maturity before 1945.
We were influenced by the English choral
tradition, Gilbert and Sullivan, Vaughan
Williams and Elgar so we were not taken
in by the mid-European avant-garde.
There are exceptions to every rule and
Tippett for instance, who was twenty
years older than me, did like the avant-garde.
But those such as Maxwell Davies and
Alexander Goehr who came to their teenage
maturity after 1945 were ripe for it
and fell under the influence of Richard
Hall at the Northern who was very much
a guru of the twelve note system".

It is not surprising
then, that Butterworth has his opinions
on the music of today and what he finds
worthwhile.

"I have very mixed
feelings on contemporary music. Some
of it I like but a larger part of it
I do not like because I do not feel
that it is music of the heart, it’s
too cerebral. I like Lutosławski
for instance and I like some of Maxwell
Davies’s later stuff but I cannot feel
attuned to Birtwistle. Of the younger
generation Mark Anthony Turnage and
Thomas Adčs have done some
good things. I also very much like Ringed
by the Flat Horizon by George Benjamin".

The conversation turns
to brass bands, a crucial part of Butterworth’s
life, as composer, player and conductor.
His compositions for bands span most
of his career and form an integral part
of his output. Yet he has also been
outspoken in his stance on the banding
world and has been quoted as controversial
in his views on more than one occasion,
not least for an article published in
the brass band press in the 1970s entitled
"Brass bands – a Cloth Cap Joke?"

"When I was in
my teens I was obsessed with the brass
band but by the time I was about seventeen
I had already begun to see that it was
narrow. I used to wonder why can’t there
be serious brass band music that would
appeal to a wide audience and particularly
deplored the narrowness with regard
to contest music. When I got the BBCM
diploma in 1942, just before I went
into the army, I wrote a letter to the
Brass Band News along the lines of:
why can’t there be a more serious attitude
to band music. Why can’t we have it
for not just the players but the rest
of the population? In a way, this has
come to pass in that there are fewer
bands but they are better technically
and musically, largely because they
are better trained. They have not come
up in the old-fashioned way. Nonetheless
I have to admit that the brass band
was something that arose for popular
entertainment and that is a function
it still fulfils. My idealist argument
with the brass band is still what I
see as an obsession with contesting.
I know that all musical organisations
have competitions, the Leeds Piano Competition
and the Tchaikovsky Competition to name
two. But brass bands take this too far,
it becomes almost like professional
football where unless you win one has
nothing. Although I do not like doing
it, I have succumbed to pressure and
adjudicated several times at contests;
but all the bands want to know is who
has won. They are not interested in
the adjudicator’s remarks."

His views on the technical
abilities of the modern brass band are
unequivocal and he has particular praise
for the Black Dyke Band which has recorded
a CD of some of the band works.

"The Black Dyke
band is the Berlin Philharmonic of the
brass band world. They are absolutely
stunning and what one asks them to do
at the rehearsal they do immediately.
I was present at a couple of the recording
sessions for the disc and they were
flawless."

Perhaps the most powerful
of Butterworth’s works for brass band,
Odin – From the Landof Fire
and Ice, did not make it onto the
Dyke disc, although the composer mentions
that it remains one of his favourites
amongst his band pieces. Conceived on
an ambitious, symphonic scale and rich
in imagery, the work takes us back to
the composer’s love of Nordic culture.
It is an undoubted technical tour-de-force
that stimulated considerable discussion
when it was used as the test piece for
the finals of the National Brass Band
Championships in 1989. Butterworth recalls
that the initial impetus for the work
stemmed from what at first seemed to
be an innocuous conversation in the
car park at Huddersfield Polytechnic.

"I was talking
to a distinguished player who taught
brass at the college and who at that
time was principal cornet with the Black
Dyke Band. ‘The trouble with your music’
he asserted, ‘is that it is not difficult
enough for contesting.’ ‘Maybe you are
right’ I said, ‘but does that mean that
you feel Paganini’s Violin Concertos
to be superior to Mozart’s because they
are more technically difficult?’ I made
the point that, for a long time, the
band movement didn’t like Holst’s A
Moorside Suite because it didn’t
have any semi-quavers in it, but it
is still a great piece of music. A short
time after this Peter Parkes asked me
to write a piece for Black Dyke and
the outcome was Odin."

Challenging though
the piece was Butterworth points out
that its technical difficulties have
since been considerably superseded by
other composers and that in certain
cases the desire to write music that
challenges the players’ techniques to
the limit has sometimes been at the
expense of the music itself.

"I have to add
though that there have been some good
pieces too like those by John McCabe
and Robert Simpson."

Yet despite the undoubted
significance of Butterworth’s output
for brass, the band movement fails to
grant it the recognition it deserves
in performance, particularly in the
concert hall. The composer himself puts
it down to the possibility that his
music might be seen as too cerebral
in some quarters, the historical custom
of the brass band being to provide basically
lighter, more popular kinds of music.

"The exception
of course is contesting, where demanding,
challenging new works are sought; but,
after serving their purpose as contest
material are subsequently largely ignored
and not promoted in concert performances
to enlighten an intelligent audience."

Butterworth is a composer
to whom symphonic thought is clearly
second nature and Odin is no
exception to this. Yet although generally
less known than his larger-scale works
there are also numerous works for chamber
forces in his catalogue of compositions.

"Most of my music
is symphonic because a large part of
my life has been involved with the orchestra
and that’s the thing I like most. In
another sort of way it has been the
brass band because I have somehow been
peripherally involved with it but I
have always wanted to be involved with
chamber music and never really had the
great opportunity. I only play the viola
badly and play the piano even worse.
When I was approaching my sixtieth birthday
I was approached by the Cheltenham Festival
to write a piece in great haste. They
had originally said four months, but
when deciding to accept the commission,
they told me that the performers were
going on a world tour and that they
would need the piece in six weeks because
they wanted to take it with them to
rehearse whilst on tour. The piece turned
out to be the FirstPiano
Trio and is one of the best pieces
I have ever written. Since then there
has also been a Second Piano Trio
and a String Quartet which I
am not happy with and ought to revise.
There are also the Symphonic Variations
for Piano Quintet, a Violin Sonata
and a Viola Sonata and quite
a bit of music for wind ensemble."

This leads the conversation
naturally on to the large-scale solo
works, an oeuvre to which Butterworth
has now made a major contribution with
concertos for a range of instruments
including a Violin Concerto for
Nigel Kennedy.

"Of the concertos
it is the Viola Concerto which
in my opinion is the best, although
there is also the Cello Concerto,
the Organ Concerto that I wrote
for Gillian Weir and the Trumpet
Concerto which was for Maurice Murphy.
There is also the Bassoon Concerto
which is now recorded and more recently,
to my own surprise, a Guitar Concerto,
which I am told is successful but which
surprises me because I don’t really
know anything about the guitar."

Despite the fact that
these pieces all possess abstract titles,
so many of Butterworth’s works have
pictorial allusions or at the very least
a strong sense of place. I am curious
as to how a work begins and whether,
given his low opinion of his own keyboard
skills, the piano is involved in the
composition process. It is a point on
which the composer is typically lucid.

"In terms of whether
I compose at the piano, the answer is
part and part. Traditionally it is supposed
to be the thing not to write at the
piano. One is supposed to have it in
one’s head and when music was diatonic
and stylised as it was with Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven etc, composers could do this.
However, once Pandora’s Box was opened
by Richard Strauss and Debussy, it became
a free-for-all where one has to invent
harmonies that are not at all easy to
analyse. So Stravinsky doesn’t go along
with Stanford’s dictum that one must
compose away from the piano and here
it is a matter of it being both an advantage
and a disadvantage to play the piano.
If one plays the piano well there can
be a temptation, which is all too easy
to succumb to, where you think of everything
in terms of the keyboard in the manner
of Chopin or Rachmaninov. It seems to
be therefore that the really great pianist
composers have tended to be indifferent
orchestrators, like Chopin and to some
degree Brahms, whose orchestration tends
to be dark brown although I do like
his music. The great orchestrators who
knew the orchestra inside out were,
almost to a man, hardly pianists at
all. I am thinking of Wagner, Richard
Strauss, Sibelius, all of whom were
indifferent pianists and writers for
the instrument. The one exception is
Ravel, a conceiver of music in keyboard
terms but who was also one of the most
gifted and imaginative orchestrators."

"I think pieces
nearly always start for me when it is
a non-musical image, when I am away
from the music room. I may be walking
on the moors, just thinking or walking
the dog. It is not necessarily a question
of atmosphere but often musical patterns
or designs and concepts about scales
in the same way that an architect might
think about shapes or how to design
a large structure. For instance the
First Symphony is really designed
along the lines of a big letter V. It
starts in B flat and then descends to
its lowest point an augmented fourth
away which is E. The whole thing is
turned upside down literally, so that
the themes that start one way are turned
upside down and finish that way. The
last movement was partly conceived by
a train journey and was also the result
of having heard, the night before, a
marvellous string quartet by Leonard
Salzedo in the form of a moto perpetuo
which I admired enormously. It was on
this train journey the following morning,
a bright July morning travelling from
London to Edinburgh, that I saw the
connection between a moto perpetuo
by rail and a moto perpetuo in
music. Asking myself how I could possibly
do that I suddenly thought of building
a chromatic scale that starts in one
key, in this case B flat for say thirty
four or thirty six bars, then moving
up a notch to B for another thirty odd
bars or so and then C, so that eventually
by the end of the movement it’s got
back to the coda which is in B flat,
having gone through all those keys."

Over forty-five years
separate the First Symphony from
the fifth instalment in Butterworth’s
symphonic cycle, which he completed
shortly before his eightieth birthday
in 2003. At the work’s premiere the
composer mentioned that in writing the
work he had gone back almost to his
roots; to long walks over Rannoch Moor
during his days as a trumpet player
in Scotland. The Fifth certainly
has the feeling of a summation, encapsulating
so much in terms of atmosphere and language
that has been the essence of Butterworth’s
music over the years. I ask therefore
whether he feels that his music has
undergone any fundamental changes with
the passage of time.

"Probably the
biggest change is that the garish colours
of a huge orchestra do not appeal quite
so much as they once did. Now it is
a matter of slimming down the scoring
to fundamental essentials with musical
(symphonic) form being far more important
than surface glitter. Colour for its
own sake soon palls; the imperishable
nature of classicism - as the great
symphonists knew - is what ultimately
matters. I have become especially wary
of the obsession with too much percussion
and the latest scores restrain the impulse
to batter everything with mindless drumming.
One could use the example of Tchaikovsky’s
solitary tam-tam stroke in the "Pathetic"
Symphony which is awe-inspiring.
On the other hand Walton’s thumping
of the tam-tam in the First Symphony
is merely tedious."

"In other ways
however I really think that my music
has basically stayed the same and will
tell you how I have come to discover
this. Within the last few years I have
become loosely associated with a group
of composers who live in Lakeland. I
don’t live in Lakeland but am near enough
to it to have become associated with
orchestral concerts and the like that
have been going on there. Consequently
I have become one of the group. A while
back they decided to put on some concerts
on a shoe-string so there was no question
of getting in an orchestra; they asked
what I had in the way of chamber music.
I unearthed a little piano piece, Lakeland
Summer Nights, which I had written
as a student, that I had completely
forgotten about and more or less dismissed
as a student work. They got the young
pianist Nicholas Rimmer, who a few days
later was in the piano final of the
BBC Young Musician of the Year competition,
and I was amazed and had no idea what
a good piece it was! Some years after
writing it I had orchestrated it as
Three Nocturnes:Northern
Summer Nights (Op. 18), which has
been played quite a lot. I couldn’t
believe that the piano part was so good.
But this is what was revealed to me,
that style really hasn’t changed. The
stylistic and harmonic approach I hear
in pieces like that, I still hear in
pieces that have been written recently.
Another piece that has come out of this
Lakeland association is the Partita
for organ which takes me back to
days in Germany and the time when Hindemith
appealed to me. If one listens to the
Partita one would say that’s
Hindemith. In a similar way the Legend
for Orchestra, written for the Buxton
Spa Orchestra in 1950, is embarrassingly
like Vaughan Williams, so much so in
fact that I blush to hear it. The 1951
Romanza for Horn is again like
Vaughan Williams. I can see how the
style has grown from there and although
some things have changed marginally,
the harmonic fingerprints are the same.
Overall though I still think the First
Symphony is the best of the works.
I had hit on the new way of constructing
and it built up a climax at the end,
that I don’t honestly think I have been
able to match since. The FourthSymphony goes some way towards
it but when I now listen to the Second
Symphony I do not think it is all
that marvellous."

It is perhaps no surprise
then that when approached by the Danish
label ClassicO with a view to recording
one of the Symphonies; it was the Symphony
No. 1 that the composer instinctively
chose.

"There is nothing
quite like the impact of a first symphony
I think".

In many ways the fifth
instalment in Butterworth’s symphonic
cycle shows the composer looking back
over his shoulder. The work exhibits
hues and echoes of earlier music, not
least the brass symphony Odin,
which closely shares its opening with
the first bar of the Fifth Symphony’s
third and final movement. Here then
we return full circle to the composer’s
affection for his First Symphony,
the work that drew its inspiration,
in part, from the composer’s love of
landscape and in particular that of
Scotland, a major influence during his
early years as a professional trumpet
player.

Although the solitary
walks across the moors may have declined
in recent years it seems that the inspiration
has not and Arthur Butterworth continues
to enjoy a glorious Indian summer of
creativity. Since completing the Sixth
Symphony he has produced another
six pieces, two of which, Coruscations
Op. 127 and Entre Chien et Loup
Op. 130 will receive first performances
during 2007. Clearly then, the composer’s
mind is as alert and enquiring as ever
as he continues to produce both music
and regular essays on musical subjects
diverse, wide-ranging and undoubtedly
controversial. Long may it continue.

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